BonaResponds Podcast

Communications Lead and Business Head (U.S. Operations) Kevin Shane was the guest host of St. Bonaventure University's BonaResponds podcast. Kevin, a St. Bona alumnus, spoke about his experiences living and working overseas, his role in the innovative, design-led sanitation initiative Project Sammaan, and his activities supporting an upcoming cultural exchange program that will bring 20 college students from Haiti to the United States.

Listen to the full podcast here or download it for free via BonaResponds' channel on iTunes.

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During the course of a five-day workshop and crash course held at NID with students from the NID Exhibition Design program, Salil and Hugo, two Quicksand design researchers explored new possibilities in storytelling through the creation of unique virtual spaces in Unity using a mix of digital content and items 3D scanned using photogrammetry.

Quicksand hosted an executive team from Schneider Electric as part of a Learning Expedition program organized by WDHB. The team had the chance to meet local energy and micro-grid experts through a facilitated discussion format on novel best practices in emerging markets:

Quicksand Co-Founder and Partner Ayush Chauhan and Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane led a daylong workshop at UX India, India’s largest international user experience conference. The theme of the workshop was Design for Social Impact, and Ayush and Kevin led the participants through several design activities and games using case studies from Quicksand’s decade-long experience in the sector.

Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane was part of a panel discussion on “Design for Social Impact” at the Under 25 Summit, India’s largest youth festival. Leaning on his experiences working in the development and humanitarian sectors, Kevin highlighted the key role of the design thinking process in driving both innovation and impact in the work Quicksand does.

Senior Design Researcher Rikta Krishnaswamy was featured in Channel News Asia’s premiere episode of the series “Field Guide to Innovation”. Along with our partners on the project, Rikta discussed our recent work in Cambodia to reduce the use of plastic bags in the country, whilst also advocating for a human-centered approach to designing new, innovative solutions to longstanding problems and challenges.

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Partners Avinash and Neha participated in a meeting with DutchCulture, centre for international cooperation, NL to discuss future collaborations around Unbox. The Unbox team shared emerging theme in India, which are ripe for creative collaboration. The visit also included meetings and discussions with creative studios such as Waag Society, AGA, TransArtists amongst others, the purpose of which was to start conversations on platforms and formats of collaboration on said themes. One of the key outcomes of the visit was the decision to hold an Unbox Pop-Up in Amsterdam in Sept-Oct this year, to bring together the Unbox team and Dutch creatives and cultural agencies to finalise formats for collaboration.

Kevin was a guest speaker at the Tufts University Ideation Lab as part of the Archimedes Project, a social enterprise that ideates, incubates, and launches sustainable, scalable social enterprises around the world that leverage existing novel technologies to improve access to clean water and sanitation, fighting associated waterborne disease. Kevin was featured as one of the sanitation experts and presented Quicksand's work on the Potty Project and Project Sammaan, converting Quicksand's real-world experiences into case studies to help ensure long-term sustainability and successful implementation of students' social ventures that emerge from the lab.

Sanitation is a complex social and developmental challenge to tackle, and a conversation about a transformational shift in the sector - making our cities and villages open defecation free - is not complete without addressing issues around infrastructure creation, technology, operations and maintenance, business model, communication, behavior change, political will, policy environment, and finally private and public sector capacities.

Ayush stressed the need for including the fundamental issue of design, whether it is the design of toilet building and technology, design of business models, or the design of a long term operating model, and the fact that the application of this core skill in making the experience of the end-user one that could prompt or support a behavior change is often compromised.

Babitha was a Jury Team member in the Design for Social Impact category of the 2015
Core77 Design Awards, which honors the most innovative, creative and forward thinking design projects every year. The jury captain for Design for Social Impact was design thinking and sustainability expert John Thackara (Director, Doors of Perception), and he had Babitha on his team along with Gill Wildman (Co-founder and Principal at Plot London) and Dr. Mathilda Tham (Design Professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden).

The Core77 Design Awards (in its 5th year) is a celebration of excellence in all areas of design. The program enlists an international jury of design experts to honor those who present creative, innovative and forward-thinking designs across 14 traditional and progressive categories. Students and professionals alike are invited to enter their work so that established, as well as up-and-coming designers can gain visibility and recognition from the global design community. Winners of the Core77 Design Awards receive yearlong publicity across the Core77 network, a trophy, and free entrance to the 2015 Core77 Conference. Winners will be announced by June 2015.

Quicksand's Shiraz Iqbal was invited to speak at The Goa Project, an "unconference" that included performance artists, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, hackers, activists, market researchers, and more. At one of the design sessions, Shiraz spoke about user-centered design, questioning the rationale behind having rigid inflexible processes in place for research and the popular persona fetish within the practice. The talk eventually evolved into a discussion about how humans are social creatures, and the way in which we use language to share experiences/ideas affects how we see and interpret the same; it became about how we close ourselves off to possibilities when we use language without considering the things that have not been said out loud.